When a service has been delivered by means of a telecommunication network by a service provider to one or more users, it is of interest for the service provider to know whether the user is satisfied with the delivered service or not, e.g. to find out if the service has shortcomings that need to be improved in some way to make it more attractive to this user and to other users. Service providers, e.g. network operators, are naturally interested in making their services as attractive as possible to users in order to increase sales, and a service may therefore be designed and developed so as to meet the users' demands and expectations as far as possible. It is therefore useful to gain knowledge about the users' opinion after service delivery in order to evaluate the service. The services discussed in this disclosure may, without limitation, be related to streaming of audio and visual content e.g. music and video, on-line games, web browsing, file downloads, voice and video calls, delivery of information e.g. in the form of files, images and notifications, and so forth, i.e. any service that can be delivered by means of a telecommunication network.
A normal way to obtain the users' opinion about a delivered service is to explicitly ask the customer, after delivery, to answer certain questions about the service in a survey or the like. For example, the service provider may send out or otherwise present an inquiry form, questionnaire or opinion poll to the customer with various questions related to user satisfaction of the service and its delivery. If several users respond to such a poll or questionnaire, the results can be used for evaluating the service, e.g. for finding improvements to make, provided that the responses are honest and that a significant number of users have answered. An example of using survey results for estimating the opinion of users is the so-called Net Promoter Score, NPS, which is calculated from answers to user surveys to indicate the users' collected opinions expressed in the survey answers.
However, it is often difficult to motivate a user to take the time and trouble to actually answer the questions and send a response back to the service provider. Users are often notoriously reluctant to provide their opinions on such matters, particularly in view of the vast amounts of information and questionnaires flooding users in the current modern society. One way to motivate the user is to reward him/her in some way when submitting a response, e.g. by giving some present or a discount either on the purchased services or when buying future services, and so forth.
Even so, it is a problem that surveys can in practice only be conducted for a limited number of users which may not be representative for all users of a service, and that the feedback cannot be obtained in “real-time”, that is immediately after service delivery. A survey should not be sent to a user too frequently either. The obtained feedback may thus get out-of-date.
Further problems include that considerable efforts and costs must be spent to distribute a survey to a significant but still limited number of users and to review and evaluate all answers coming in, sometimes with poor results due to low responsiveness. Furthermore, the user may provide opinions which are not really accurate or honest and responses to surveys may even be misleading. For example, the user is often prone to forget how the service was actually perceived or experienced when it was delivered, even after a short while, once prompted to respond to a questionnaire. Human memory thus tends to change over time, and the response given may not necessarily reflect what the user really felt and thought at service delivery. The user may further provide the response very hastily and as simply as possible not caring much if it really reflects their true opinion. The opinion expressed may also be dependent on the user's current mood such that different opinions may be expressed at different occasions, making the response all the more erratic and unreliable.
Still another problem is that it can be quite difficult to trace an underlying reason why users have been dissatisfied with a particular service, so as to take actions to eliminate the fault and improve the service and/or the network used for its delivery. Tracing the reason for such dissatisfaction may require that any negative opinions given by users need to be correlated with certain operational specifics related to network performance, e.g. relating to where, when and how the service was delivered to these users. This kind of information is not generally available and analysis of the network performance must be done manually by looking into usage history and history of network issues. Much efforts and costs are thus required to enable tracing of such faults and shortcomings.